Atari 8-bit Utilities
SIO2Linux
Updated: 22 November 2008
Pavel Machek made an initial attempt at communicating with the Atari through an SIO2PC cable using Linux's serial port drivers. He came up with a simple floppy emulator.
I rewrote that to add a bunch of features:
- No kernel modules.
Unlike the AtariSIO project, this is just a simple user-space program that uses a serial port device.
- Create new dynamically sized images
Each image starts as a 3-sector image file, but grows to accomodate the highest-numbered sector written.
- Mount your native file system as an Atari disk
It's read-only for now, and it doesn't support subdirectories, but each file is mapped to a different starting sector, and as that sector is read, it automatically maps in the rest of the file.
The only technical reference I've found online for programming SIO devices is Chapter 13 of the Atari System Reference Manual.
DISK: A sector editor and much more
Updated: 27 February 2006
Back in the mid 80's, I wrote a sector editor in BASIC. Over several years, I incorporated additional features and tools, as well as re-wrote various routines in assembly language for speed. I should have released it back then, but now I've gone back through it and added a few extra features. I also re-worked all of the assembly language code.
I released version 3.0 on 5 September 2005. Since then, I've added a few features and bug fixes, and re-written some of the assembly.
Features include
- Sector editor
- Disk copying
- Single and Enhanced density support
Sorry, no double-density support
- Tachometer (re-written in 4.0)
- Generate the world's smallest Autorun.SYS files
Download it with the full Assembly sources: disk-4.0.atr
Binary load file analyzer
This program will tell you all about your binary-load format Atari
files, and even clean them up if there are specific problems. It runs
under DOS and Unix.
Disk image format conversions
Want to convert between DCM and ATR? Want to turn an ATR disk image
into individual files on your native file system (even creating
subdirectories for MyDos images!)? Or convert a directory full of
files back into a disk image? Well, check out these programs:
Binary load menu
Use this as an autorun.sys file, and you'll get a directory of all
your binary-load files. It's designed for use with MyDos, and it
supports subdirectories. File selection is done with the joystick.
It was written in BASIC, and compiled with ABC. It relies on the DOS
XIO command for binary loading, so it should load anything that DOS
will load (though DOS 2.0S doesn't support that XIO).
Read Atari disks in a PC drive
I haven't had much luck with this, but apparently if you happen to
have the right controller and drive, you can use these to read
standard and enhanced-density Atari disks on your PC.
I expect you'll get about the same results under Linux with the following:
- setfdprm /dev/fd1 dd sect=26 head=1 cyl=40 ssize=128 tpi=48 fm=0 dtr=1
- dd if=/dev/fd1 of=disk.image.inverted bs=128
- invert < disk.image.inverted > disk.image (invert.c)
The above example is for 1050 enhanced disks. With my 1.2M drive, it
reads the first 40 bytes of sector 1 correctly, then returns garbage
for the rest of the disk. For true DD disks, change the setfdprm to
sect=18 and ssize=256; also change to bs=256 for the dd command. For
SD disks, change the setfdprm to sect=18 and fm=1; but don't expect it
to work; most PC controlers won't do single density (FM vs MFM).
Write your own SIO2PC programs
Someone gave these to me, and I haven't had time to do much with them.
If you're interested in writing programs that work with SIO2PC, you'll
probably find them quite useful. (I was hoping to write a menu
program that would run on the Atari and let you change disk images on
the PC, but never got around to it.)
Oh, and here's what I believe to be the latest version of SIO2PC: s2pc410.zip
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